An actual clue on “Jeopardy” last night, as quoted by Alliance for Justice: “Of these 874 federal government jobs, 85 are vacant, some for over five years.”

The correct question, as you may have guessed, is: What are judges?

So if it’s reached “Jeopardy,” it’s worth taking a look at how bad things are at this point.

Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, having secured the necessary 1,144 delegates last night, is playing a dangerous game.

Rather than be a statesman, he refuses to forcefully condemn the birther barnstorming of Donald Trump. What the Donald is doing — flopping about in a pool of proven lies for attention’s sake — is detestable and corrosive to political discourse. To literally stand next to someone who rides a wave of racist conspiracy theories to question the legitimacy of the president is equally detestable and demonstrates a reprehensible willingness by Romney to do whatever he feels is necessary to win.

Putting Romney on the couch, Ruth Marcus gets at part of the reason for this by citing two separate profiles on his parents. “You have to wonder what George and Lenore Romney would have made of their son the candidate,” she writes in The Post today. “The last week has brought two insightful profiles of Mitt Romney’s parents, offering an implicit, and disappointing, contrast with their more successful son.”

Like his father, Wallace-Wells writes, Mitt Romney is “caught in a similarly uneasy negotiation with conservatives.”

Here is the telling difference, and the sad, perhaps inevitable, trajectory of any political dynasty, from idealism to expediency. George Romney railed — indeed, he battled — against what he saw happening. Mitt Romney has adapted to it.

But John Avlon gets right at the heart of the matter by echoing what I’ve been saying in one form or another for months now.

Romney’s repeated reluctance to take such a stand speaks to the extent to which he is still being held hostage by the right-wing reality-show primaries. It reeks of Stockholm syndrome — Romney seems to think his captors are his friends. If the lure of big money isn’t enough to cause him to break the birther embrace, what will? Where is the red line that Romney won’t cross in his pursuit of political gold?

The fact that his long-fought-for nomination victory is being overshadowed by this radioactive distraction ought to be wakeup call enough. Romney is now the leader of the Republican Party, and it’s his responsibility to stand tall and set a tone that shows a capacity to be president of the United States. Failure to confront and condemn ignorance and hate indicates precisely the opposite.

  
The classic definition of chutzpah is the child who kills his parents and throws himself on the mercy of the court as an orphan. The classic definition when it comes to politics is for the Obama campaign to demand that Mitt Romney disassociate himself from the loathsome Donald Trump when it took Barack Obama oh-so-long to kiss off the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Do two wrongs make a Wright?

Having punned egregiously, I know I must hasten to add that Trump’s insistence that Obama’s place of birth remains an open question is both revolting and dopey. He has kept at this so long that it is no longer possible to question his sincerity, just his intelligence. He ought to know that the so-called birthers exude the fetid aroma of racism: To them, the oddly named Obama just doesn’t look like a president should.

The answer to the Syrian tragedy isn’t complicated: It’s a political transition, starting now, from the regime of President Bashar al-Assad to a government of national unity that includes the opposition but also retains the basic structure of the Syrian state.

The entire world, outside Assad’s ruiling clique, supports this process. Even Russia, which is supposedly the Syrian dictator’s last friend, seems to be pulling away. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Monday that while Syrians should decide the transition, “Russia is not tied to Assad’s staying in power.”

So why doesn’t it happen? The answer is that Russian President Vladimir Putin is playing a cynical game of power politics, delaying the transition that he nominally supports. He gives lip service to U.N. diplomacy as an alternative to war, but does nothing to advance it.

So the question shouldn’t be how to turn up the heat on Assad, but rather, how to turn up the heat on Putin. Washington needs to be more persuasive with Moscow, but the heavy lifting here will be done by America’s partners in the region—Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, India—whose friendship or, at least, tolerance is important to Putin’s vision of Russian restoration.

Breast-beating about the President Obama’s decision not to intervene militarily misses the point that this is Russia’s failure, not America’s. Even Syria’s embattled Sunnis don’t want to see another American-led war in the region. 

After Friday’s massacre of more than 100 civilians in the village of Houla, the Syrian regime is playing by “Houla rules,” to paraphrase my colleague Tom Friedman’s description of the “Hama rules” that Assad’s father Hafez used to obliterate Sunni resistance 30 years ago in another blood-soaked town in central Syria. 

But the international community is still playing by “Kofi Annan rules,” as in the former U.N. secretary-general’s peace plan, which translates to waiting and hoping.

So let’s say it again: The right answer in Syria is clear. There must be a political transition that begins with the departure of the Assad-Maklouf family mafia, and moves to a broad-based government that includes the opposition (if it can get its act together) plus acceptable respresentatives of all the Syrian political factions and communities. Parliamentary elections would be set, and international peacekeepers would help restrain the score-settling and bloodletting that will surely follow Assad’s departure.

This process of change could begin tomorrow, if Russia would get serious. Putin can sponsor the talks, sign the peace deal, take a victory lap in Damascus, win a prize. But he has to get started now, or the Syrian mayhem will get worse, fast. And if he fails to act, the blood of future massacres will be on Putin’s hands.

The picture of President Obama bowing to Jacob Philadelphia so that the 5-year-old Oval Office visitor could touch his hair has touched countless people. When I wrote about that the photo speaks volumes about Obama and race, the response was immediate. There was even more when a version of it appeared in the dead-tree edition of The Post on Saturday. But an e-mail from Katharine Cooper-Arnold added even more to the conversation about the heart-tugging picture.
(Pete Souza/The White House)

Thank you for posting the photo of President Obama and Jacob. It elucidates very well your closing editorial comment: the President does not need to constantly speak about race. His actions and the actions of many of his detractors (who contrary to their denial seem like racists to me) keep the conversation alive in our country. Actually just seeing a photo of the president every day reminds me of race. As a white woman who was fortunate to be surrounded by strong black women when I was growing up, I have always felt that the assertion when President Obama was elected that race no longer mattered to be wishful thinking. Race is part of our collective conscious and unconscious in this country for better or worse. The first African-American president makes it better; birthers make it worse. But race matters. Just ask Jacob Philadelphia.

My eyes roll at every mention of post-racial this or race-doesn’t-matter that. Post-racial America is where unicorns live. By asking the question of Obama, even Jacob understood that race matters. But what he learned in that now-iconic moment is that race isn’t the impediment to success that it once was.